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By Matt A.V. ChabanThe New York Times • Sunday August 31, 2014 6:44 AM

View SlideshowRequest to buy this photoCherie DoughanAbove: The Atlantic Ocean can be seen through a window of the Doughans’ trailer in Montauk, N.Y., on Long Island. Left: Cherie Doughan, far left, with mom Jacqueline and their dog at the trailer in the past.

MONTAUK, N.Y. — When they were growing up in the 1970s and ’80s, Cherie and Merry Doughan spent
their summers at Montauk Shores, a mobile-home park that is about as far east as you can live on
Long Island and still have a roof over your head. Only the Montauk Association Houses, where Andy
Warhol and Dick Cavett summered, and the lighthouse keeper’s place lie beyond.

“It was the Wild West back then,” Cherie Doughan said. “Or, I guess you’d call it the Wild East.
People sure knew how to party.”

Both sisters fondly recall the bathtub their father, Alpha, had found. It sat crookedly on the
lawn in front of their white and beige Liberty mobile home, and their father would fill it with
suds and climb in with a case of beer or a jug of Gallo wine. He would invite passers-by to join
him, and many obliged, splashing in beside him.

The tub is gone, replaced by a deck overlooking the Atlantic, but otherwise the home, 12 by 48
feet, is almost unchanged since it was trucked in in 1977. With great sadness, the sisters are
giving it up.

A million-dollar mobile home is not an entirely new phenomenon. Malibu, Calif., has two
mobile-home parks populated by rock stars, movie moguls and bedraggled surfers, and Aspen, Colo.,
has one.

But at the Park, as everyone calls it, lawyers, business people and socialites are beginning to
replace the fishermen, farmers, surfers and municipal workers like Alpha Doughan, a New York City
firefighter who died in 2005.

“I hate to sell it. I don’t want to sell it, I just don’t, but there it is,” Cherie Doughan
said. She and her mother, Jacqueline, live in Placida, Fla., and her sister is in Houston. The
proceeds will help pay for their mother’s stay at an assisted-living home.

The family has been in the park since it looked like one. Tents first started popping up in the
1940s, and then trailers — the Doughans’ among them. In 1972, a group of regulars bought the 20
acres overlooking the surfing and fishing hole of Ditch Plains and divided them into 199
parcels.

The look of Montauk Shores owes much to Alpha Doughan, who had a contract with the Liberty
mobile-home company and sold its $5,000 trailers to many of his neighbors to put on their $10,000
plots.

“He was kind of the mayor around here,” said Chris Shelby, a construction worker who came to
Montauk Shores with his parents and then raised his children here.

With dark wood paneling, two stuffy bedrooms and an intact 1970s kitchen, the Doughans’ mobile
home will almost certainly be replaced. The new owners will be basically buying the land, paying
more than 100 times what Mr. Doughan did, for one of the primest parcels in Montauk Shores.

It is on a larger, 2,000-square-foot lot, with room for a double-wide mobile home and a new
deck, a luxury the narrower waterfront parcels, each 1,200 square feet, do not enjoy. “It’s still
one of the best deals on the East End,” said Helen Stubbmann, the Corcoran broker selling the
Doughans’ property.